Senior Leadership

Dr. Dhankhar currently serves as the HEOR lead at CHEORS, where his primary responsibility is the adaptation of models to support reimbursement efforts. Prior to joining CHEORS, he worked in the pharmaceutical industry and Center for Disease Control as a health economist for nearly 10 years. Dr. Dhankhar has worked extensively in multiple disease areas including vaccines, oncology, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, infectious diseases, and ultra-rare diseases. He is an expert in economic modeling, country submissions for HTA review, and developing strategy to generate value evidence for products. He has launched products both globally and in US and has extensive experience in working with country affiliates. He has helped countries understand various economic models, created input sheets to be shared with countries, and assisted countries with collecting data for model inputs. He has also generated reports and slide decks based on the model analysis to be shared with the countries. 

Dr. Bagga is Senior Director, HEOR, at CHEORS. Prior to joining CHEORS, she worked in the pharma industry, consulting, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for more than 12 years. She has worked extensively in multiple disease areas including vaccines, pain management, respiratory, and biologics. Shalini has helped to conduct multi-country studies worldwide and collect data. She has helped to launched products both globally and in the US and has extensive experience in working with country affiliates. She currently leads the systematic literature review, meta-analysis, and dossier creation at CHEORS. 

Dr. Cook currently serves as Vice President for Economic Modeling at CHEORS. In this capacity, he is responsible for overseeing the development of all new health economic models at CHEORS, and personally directs many of them. Prior to joining CHEORS, John served as Executive Director and headed (for 15 years) the Health Economic Statistics Department in CORE at Merck & Co., Inc. Dr Cook and his team were responsible for the development and adaptation of health economic models to project the long-term impact of treatment on health outcomes and cost. John also gained valuable experience analyzing clinical trial data for economic purposes. Over 30 years of experience, with 50 articles published, he is an expert in developing and guiding teams to develop cost-effectiveness and budget impact models and in capitalizing on clinical trial data for health economic purposes. Dr. Cook has published over 50 articles, book chapters and reviews in health economics and statistics and has taught short-courses on conducting economic evaluations at several venues, including the Joint Statistical Meetings, International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) conferences, International Health Economics Association Conference, and at the Stockholm School of Economics. He also served on two ISPOR Good Research Practices Task Forces – for Randomized Clinical Trial-Cost Effectiveness Analysis (RCT-CEA) and for Economic Data Transferability.

Dr. Aparasu is the Real-World Evidence Advisory Lead for CHEORS. He has over 25 years of research experience in academia and consulting, mainly focusing on real-world data assets and novel methodological and analytical approaches for causal inference in observational research. He has edited three textbooks in healthcare research and has over 160 peer-reviewed publications. He served as a grant reviewer for the American Heart Association (AHA), Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He is a Fellow of the American Pharmacists Association (FAPhA) and a Fulbright Specialist. In 2022, he was honored by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) as the recipient of the Paul R. Dawson Award for Excellence in Patient Care Research.